There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, andits crumbling, leafy terraces....There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting fliesLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness fo...r their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that ...valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girlWith the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,...And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,And I'll do the same for you, for things are badAll over, etc., etc."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, I have read them all,Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call . . ....And know the explanation I must pass is thisMYou cannot light a match on a crumbling wall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

a fortress against ideas and against theShuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors...The little sardine men crammed in a monster toyWho tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »